These days, a new doctor’s series that still looks fresh and original is hard to find. There are already so many out there that it truly seems like all recourses have been used up. Creators come up with all kinds of things to make their series special, trying to still make a difference somehow. In this case, it’s the main character’s autism and savant syndrome that make the series different. Whether it was enough to keep things interesting and fresh, you’ll soon find out if you keep reading.

Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore) just got his doctor’s degree, and is now a surgical resident at the St. Bonaventure Hospital in San Jose. It took some convincing by the President of the hospital, Dr. Aaron Glassman (Richard Schiff) to get him in though, as his people skills aren’t exactly what you would call smooth, as he has autism and the savant syndrome. While his people skills are really bad, he is extremely bright, and has no problem making links between the things he once learnt or saw, often coming to a good solution to help a patient. He is not always right though, so there is definitely still room for improvement.

It’s clear that the problem isn’t so much Shaun’s medical knowledge, but much more his interaction with other people. He can’t lie, and he always says what pops in his head, even in front of patients, which often results in people looking weird at him, and them being worried to death about something he said, while he isn’t in the least aware that he did something wrong. Also his colleagues don’t appreciate this very much, and frankly, most of the staff would rather see him go. Lucky for Sean, Dr. Glassman defends him, but it’s clear that he will have to prove himself worthy more than anyone else, and he certainly still has a lot to learn about human interaction, something, sadly for him, he can’t learn from books.

As we already mentioned above, these days it’s quite hard to find a doctor’s series that is truly interesting. They all try to come up with something special, and in the case of The Good Doctor, this means that the lead character Shaun has autism and savant syndrome. If we’re really honest, we must say we weren’t very impressed with the plot, and frankly, Shaun often just annoyed us. Definitely in the first few episodes, Shaun’s autism is played out too much to be enjoyable to watch, as you’ll just see how he offends people without even realizing it, and it is very clear from the start that he just really has a lot of difficulty functioning well in the hospital. But is that not exactly what a doctor is supposed to do?

We really weren’t impressed at the start, but luckily, after a few episodes, the series did turn more into a ‘regular’ doctor’s series, which still didn’t blow us away, but was a lot more enjoyable to watch nonetheless. To give Shaun’s character more depth, you’ll get to see glimpses of his past, in which something terrible apparently happened to his brother. It’s a nice try to spice things up a bit, and to a certain extent it did, but it wasn’t enough to keep our attention in the long run.

Freddie Highmore does a decent job portraying the autistic Shaun Murphy. He’s fairly convincing in a role that mustn’t have been easy to play. More fun to watch was Nicholas Gonzalez as Dr. Neil Melendez though, as his character was just more interesting, and made the series move faster.

The extras on this DVD release of the first season of The Good Doctor include the usual: deleted scenes, bloopers and behind the scenes. We weren’t mad about what the extras had to offer, but there wasn’t anything that stood out, so we might as well have done without. Nonetheless, we won’t complain, as it’s always nice to see that you do get something extra when actually buying a physical copy, even if the extras are rather trivial.

Conclusion

With The Good Doctor, yet another doctor’s series was released, this time with an autistic doctor to make things interesting. however, in reality it mostly made things annoying, we found. If you’re not too picky about doctor’s series, you might be interested in this one, but frankly, it doesn’t add something new to the genre at all, so if you’re looking for some excitement, we suggest you go look elsewhere.

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Rating: 5.6/10 (7 votes cast)

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The Good Doctor: Season 1 (DVD) - Series Review, 5.6 out of 10 based on 7 ratings